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1. Introduction
 

2. Dialogue and Other Political Theories
 

3. Dialogue Misconceived
 

4  Why Two Kinds?
 

5. Urgent Dialogue
 

6  Ongoing Background Dialogue
 

7.Conclusion
 

8. Bibliography
 

9. About this paper and the author

DIALOGUE AND MORAL DISAGREEMENT

4. Why two kinds of dialogue? 

In the previous chapter it became rather clear that one of my biggest concerns with current dialogue theories is their use of constraints.  In Ackerman's case, I questioned the viability of a constraint which allowed people to refer only to shared premises in talking through their disagreements.  In the case of Gutmann and Thompson, I expressed serious doubts about the helpfulness and applicability of the plausibility and reciprocity constraints. 
Here I want to generalize my concerns about constraints.  So, in this chapter, I will first give some different ways of understanding constraints (and indirectly, dialogue).  I will then explain my reservations about some of them.  Then I will look at the problem of the apparent necessity of constraints, concluding that while constrained dialogue may be necessary in some cases, it is not sufficient for a fair conception of dialogue.  I will then offer a way of getting around this problem—by advocating the establishment of two different "tiers" of dialogue—one constrained, and the other unconstrained.  The next two chapters will examine each tier separately. 

I can think of four different ways of understanding the nature and purpose of constraints.  One way to understand constraints is to see them as making the dialogue produce just results in the strong sense of "just."  That is, one might think that by adding certain constraints to a dialogue, we can get it to produce the inherently "right" conclusions.  For example, one might define justice and moral truth outright as whatever is produced in a dialogue which is constrained in certain ways.  The constraints exist to idealize the discussion in certain respects, so as to create "perfect" results from the dialogue even though the participants, everyday human beings with lots of other concerns, are hardly ideal. 

A related usage of constraints is that proposed by Ackerman.  He too wants to have just policies simply be the outcome of a dialogue.  But instead of using constraints to idealize the conversation to make up for the defectiveness of its participants, he appears to use them in order to justify a particular (standard liberal) political structure.  He seems to see dialogue in more of a "reflective equilibrium" sort of way—to some extent he knows what answers he wants to come up with, and shapes his dialogues around those.  Tweaking the constraints would lead to an adjustment of the outcomes of deliberation.  This way of using dialogue and constraints tends to be a hypothetical one.  Just as an argument for a particular political conception from a hypothetical "original position" aims to convince individuals that they would have chosen that political conception under certain conditions which they accept as reasonable ways of constraining a thought experiment, so an argument for a particular political conception from a hypothetical dialogue aims to convince individuals that they would have arrived at that political conception through a deliberation under certain constraints which they would accept as reasonable.  The idea is to narrow and focus the individual's contemplation and reflection over what sort of political conception he would consider fair. 

The problem with the former of these approaches is that it is quite unclear what the constraints ought to be in order to necessarily produce just outcomes.  It is one thing to say the standards of justice and morality are whatever is agreed upon by the community after deliberation.  That is a controversial position, but it seems reasonable in certain respects.  It becomes very difficult, though, to justify the introduction of constraints because it is hard to see how those constraints could themselves be justified.  If they are just the constraints that would be agreed to after deliberation by the community, then why bother to impose them externally at all instead of just letting them emerge from the deliberation itself?  In what ways are we defective (morally or communicatively) so that our dialogue must be constrained and corrected by these particular requirements? 

The problem with the latter of the two approaches is that either one of two things will happen.  Either the constraints themselves will not be accepted by the individual who is considering the hypothetical dialogue, in which case he will not find much persuasive bite in the argument, or they will not entail the results that the hypothetical dialogue theorist claims they do, in which case the argument simply will not work.  If the constraints are strong enough to pick out a particular political conception, they will be too controversial to elicit universal acceptance; if they are weak enough to be accepted by everyone, they will not do the work of arguing for a particular political conception, which is what their proposer wanted them to do. 

Another way of understanding dialogic constraints is to see them as outer bounds on what can be discussed, ways of ruling out some conclusions which would be unjust or evil.  (Of course, which conclusions are counted as being unjust and evil depends to a large degree on the moral perspective of whoever is proposing the constraints.)  Gutmann and Thompson's theory appears to be an example of this.  Under this view, dialogue itself, constrained or otherwise, does not guarantee correct results; there are certain things which would be wrong or unjust regardless of whether they were agreed to or not—racial discrimination, for example.   Dialogues might produce unjust solutions, and constraints are ways of preventing at least some of these.  The problem with this understanding of constraints is that such constraints will not be accepted by anyone who holds one of the positions which are being ruled out.  They will just see it as discrimination against their views, as an imposition of a controversial morality on them.  If they do not accept the constraints as legitimate or correct, their ability to participate productively in the deliberation will be severely diminished, resulting in their leaving the discussion, their being forced to leave, or their sabotaging of the dialogue itself.  Furthermore, insofar as these constraints are controversial, they open up yet more areas of disagreement which somehow need to be resolved, and the fact that they have not been justified to everyone makes them problematic to a certain degree.  What fair and justifiable way is there of picking out certain areas (on which there is moral disagreement, however small) to be ruled out of the conversation?  It appears to me that we have no such justifiable way, and Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative democracy would be able to get away with it only insofar as the group whose position was being ruled out was too small and powerless to cause much trouble. 

The last way of understanding constraints, which seems to me to be the most plausible way of understanding them, is as pragmatic constraints.  Their value lies not in their ability to produce inherently correct answers or to rule out wrong ones, but in their helpfulness in making the dialogue process work, in making agreement at least sometimes attainable. 

After all, one might wonder, why put any limits at all on the conversation?  Why not just let each talk and respond as he sees fit?  At first glance this kind of dialogue seems more free, more democratic.  We could let people give their reasons and positions as they value them.  For example, when asked to give reasons in support of their views, they could give the reasons which actually lead them themselves to support those views.  Under a constrained system of dialogue, people might instead have to give a defense of their views which has nothing to do with their own reasons for possessing those views.  I am not saying that people shouldn't try to find a variety of ways to defend and justify their own views to a variety of audiences—in a later section of this paper I will explicitly argue how they should—but I am suggesting that in some sense it seems problematic to rule out in many cases a man's appealing to his own beliefs and reasons in the discussion.  Perhaps it would make more sense just to let the conversation regulate itself, as conversations often do.  If one wants to remain a part of a discussion, he at least has to control his conduct in such a way that the other discussants won't get irritated by him and throw him out.  If he wants his views and concerns to be considered fairly or favorably by others, he is going to have to present them in way that is acceptable to the others.  So we might think that a citizen's desire to remain in the discussion and gain acceptance for his views in it would put enough of a curb on participants' behavior so as to make explicit constraints unnecessary.

 But the problem is that it still seems that constraints of some sort would be necessary "to keep the conversation going".  For it seems that the people would quickly run out of material to discuss if the defenders of a particular policy offer no reasons for it besides the fact that the Pope supports it unless all members of the society were conservative Catholics, among whom that reason might count as a good one.  Assuming that the majority of the discussants will not find this to be a good reason, the dialogue seems to have reached an impasse far short of an agreement.   Perhaps it is not really an impasse.  For most practical purposes it seems like one, but it is certainly conceivable that somehow enough talk and enough examination of the man's underlying beliefs could lead to a "conversion" one way or the other.  They could argue over whether or not the Pope should be understood as supporting the policy, or what the nature of his authority is, or why the non-Catholics should respect that authority.  But it seems that there is no place for moral argument to go.  Now, that in itself might not be a bad thing; after all, it would be very optimistic to think that dialogue would always result in agreement, but we might think that such unrestrained dialogue ends too soon.  We might think that it could have gone on further, and that some good might have come out of that further discussion.  Constraints help to ensure that anything substantial that one group says in the conversation will provide at least some fuel for a response by those who disagree with them.  Insisting, for example, that both groups only offer as reasons statements which all participants in the discussion accept, would seem to avert that particular kind of impasse.  However, the problem with this rather extreme constraint is that it would probably so severely restrict the kinds of reasons we could offer that we would be unable to make decent arguments for our views at all.  In fact, if you have a conclusive argument for your position and your rivals do not accept your position, unless they are quite logically inept they must reject at least some of the premises in your argument, and therefore you could not put forward your argument for consideration in the first place.  But it seems that less serious constraints could help the discussants to avoid at least some of the dead-ends which they might otherwise end up in.

What these constraints should be would depend greatly upon what the different groups felt to be good constraints.  The problem with certain liberal dialogue models is that the constraints they dictate are likely in many cases to be accepted by one side but not the other.  If the dialoguers disagree about the legitimacy of the constraints, it is difficult to see how dialogue could be productive at all.  But it might be too much to ask that all agree on the constraints—that would of course be ideal, but setting the standard that high might prevent any dialogues from ever taking place.  Still, it seems to be a fair requirement that the major parties in any disagreement who are interested in dialogue be able to more or less accept the same set of constraints. 

Of course, in addition to any explicit constraints we might come up with, there will also be constraints implicit in each of the participants' attitudes—what they will let their fellow citizens get away with, so to speak.  How charitable will they be in interpreting the moral frameworks of their rivals?  Will they count their opponents as reasonable people, people worth conversing with, or not?  In order for the dialogue system to work, we must assume at least some degree of goodwill, a willingness to at least try to some extent to understand those who disagree and consider them reasonable enough to dialogue with.  Obviously, not all people can be part of a reasonable conversation (for example, the insane cannot), but in order for a dialogue to work, each has to be willing to give the others the benefit of the doubt.  Almost as importantly, the dialogue system's success requires that the participants at least be willing to consider compromise on some matters.  By this I mean that the participants have to be aware that they are unlikely to conclusively convince those who disagree with them in the short run, and therefore be willing to settle for policy solutions which don't give either of the groups all that they wanted. They have to be willing in principle and on most matters to try to meet those who disagree with them somewhere in the middle in terms of making policy decisions.10   The question of why anybody should compromise is a more difficult one—it will be taken up at the end of the next chapter. 

So it seems evident that if dialogue is to be a useful tool in the short-term in confronting moral conflicts within the society, it will need to have some form of constraints to keep things moving.  And in many cases, it seems that we do need such a dialogue that can make progress within a very limited amount of time.  What to do in response to unexpected changes in the world and within the society itself, the making of law and public policy—these are the sorts of decisions which cannot be postponed indefinitely until our dialoguers arrive at perfect agreement.  I call the kind of disagreement which springs up about these decisions "pressing disagreement"—pressing in the sense that we cannot sensibly just agree to disagree about these matters, and I call the kind of dialogue which is focused on such disagreements "urgent dialogue"—urgent in the sense that the dialogue has to carried out immediately and within a short timespan.  Both will be defined and discussed further in the next chapter.  So it seems that if we want to use dialogue in those sorts of cases, it will have to be of a constrained kind.

 But it must be noted that the constraints were introduced for purely pragmatic reasons—we want a dialogue that can move along when it needs to and not stagnate—rather than for reasons of justice.  In fact, it seemed on the surface that these constraints possibly reduced the "just-ness" of dialogue as a method of resolving moral conflict.  We might think that just laws and public policy should be ideally what everybody would come to eventually agree on in a free (unconstrained) and fair (where each citizen has equal footing in the debate) discussion.  This seems to be the ideally just case.  I am not saying that there are laws and policies which are inherently just independent of the society which free and fair discussion would necessarily home in on.  I am saying that the laws and policies chosen would be just in at least one important respect in virtue of the fact that they were what everybody agreed on at the end of a free and fair discussion.  As we move away from that ideal to make it more workable in practice, it becomes less clear that the outcome of the dialogue will be necessarily just in this way, that it will give us right answers to the questions about what to do. 

There are further difficulties with the issue of constraints as well. For one thing, it seems highly unlikely that any constraints are going to be equally fair to everybody.  In fact, some constraints might be chosen by the more powerful players simply to rule out positions and arguments held by "moral minorities".  As was mentioned above, it is highly unlikely that we could come up with a set of useful constraints that would be acceptable to all.  In any case, it seems that thought about what the proper constraints should be would involve reflection about what sort of resulting solutions/compromises a discussion under those constraints would end up with, so that constraints might have a bias against one side or the other packed into them. It seems that constraints might often tend to favor one viewpoint over another, one worldview over another, and hence perhaps even one group over another. One might even go so far as to worry that the restrictions put on dialogue allow an intellectual elite to dominate, since they are the ones best able to defend their views within the constraints dictated. Now we might accept this, and say that it is fair that the philosophers should dominate the conversations because their reasoning is likely to be cleaner and their solutions likely to be more satisfactory than the average person's.  Their answers should win out because their answers are usually better.  Or, we might think that there is something suspicious about the fact that the setters of the terms of dialogue (the dialogue philosophers) are the sort of people who will generally be most successful in prevailing. 

What I mean is that currently it is philosophers and political theorists who are talking about how such dialogues should be set up, and it seems that philosophical arguments are the sort of thing that would fare very well in a dialogue set up by them.  Their moral views, their worldviews, and their philosophies (or something similar to them) are likely to be able to be defended quite faithfully under the system they have set up.

Another concern that we might have comes from the fact that these compromises and solutions may not always be stable.  After all, it is clear that compromises can be huge sources of tension for individuals within a society, as they are often being asked to acquiesce in something they consider to be a social moral wrong. With individual moral wrongs, one can in many cases take a "live and let live" attitude to some degree.  But with social moral wrongs, moral defects in the laws or policies or actions of the society, it is difficult to be that indifferent.  For most people care a great deal about the society they live in, since to some extent they associate themselves with it.  Even if someone is not drafted to go fight a war that his society started, even if the war has no significant direct effect on him at all, he may nonetheless be extremely outraged at his society's behavior if he feels this war to be unjust.  People may come to the conclusion later that the compromise they struck was not the right response to the disagreement. Many citizens who were outside the dialogue (if we have a representative system) may never have approved of the compromise in the first place. So these short urgent dialogues most often terminating in compromise will be unsuitable as long-term final answers.   Compromises on moral matters are going to be tenuous no matter what—if the process with which those compromises are arrived at is flawed, they will be even further extenuated.  Both sides of a particular disagreement might come to feel bitter towards each other for the concessions they made to them.

For these reasons I would argue that constrained, focused, urgent, goal-oriented, compromise-laden dialogue is unlikely to be able to address all of our concerns about how groups with differing ethical frameworks can coexist in a flourishing society.  It might be thought that that is all right, especially since even dialogue to that extent would seem to make coexistence better than it is now.  Right now the groups on different sides of big debates over social policy and morality do little talking to each other while spending most of their energy on attacking and discrediting the other side and struggling to gain dominance in the political sphere, whether by lobbying or by bombarding average citizens with rhetoric and advertising.  In short, we have pretty much an all-out culture war.  Even the limited and flawed sort of dialogue discussed above would be better than that.

But I would argue that it would be even better if we added a second sort of dialogue to supplement the constrained one.  This other kind of dialogue would not be constrained.  It would not be aimed towards resolving any particular disagreement.  It would not even necessarily focus on pressing social issues.  It would not have a time limit.  Rather, it would be more of a free discussion between people with differing moral belief-frameworks seeking to understand each other's positions better and trying to assess and criticize them.  This sort of discussion would be beneficial for several reasons.  First of all, it would be helpful to all of us as reflective moral beings to have our views criticized and to become aware of alternatives.  Secondly, it would bring about a greater understanding of those outside one's moral community—a better understanding of why they hold the views they do, for these conversations would not need to be so streamlined and get-to-the-point as the urgent dialogues are, but could take the time to build a deeper understanding of the others' worldviews.  And thirdly, they might even offer hope (or so I shall argue) for a broader and more substantial kind of agreement, a kind of moral convergence.  In short, it seems quite beneficial to have two tiers of dialogue:  one intended to help us arrive at solutions or compromises on a relatively short-term basis, a very pragmatically inclined sort of dialogue, and another intended to help further stability, cooperation, and harmony in the longer run, a pursuit of increased understanding of the disagreeing views as well as a pursuit of eventual agreement.

Another reason for having two tiers of dialogue is that at least some dialogues for practical reasons must be considerably limited in terms of who is going to be involved.  Most pressing disagreements, for example, will have to be handled by an official governing or adjudicating body of one sort or another consisting of relatively few people.  In any case where we have to come to some conclusion within a reasonable amount of time, a huge free-for-all national conversation will be impracticable. 

But one might easily think that dialogue's importance does not belong to the official political bodies alone, that the only disagreements which it ought to address are those within legislatures or school boards or among official representatives of disagreeing groups or the like.  One might think that disagreements among the general population ought to be addressed as well, especially given that the flawed natures of most systems of representation will often make many citizens resistant to accepting the agreement arrived upon by their representatives as truly their own.  This does not mean that they will act in defiance of it; certainly their civic responsibilities require some sort of acceptance of the validity of the representative's authority to make such agreements and compromises.  Nonetheless, they may not be content and at ease with the decision, and thus desire to have it brought up again to be addressed in a better way.  One might easily doubt that a pluralistic society can resolve all its problems caused by tumultuous moral disagreement merely on an official political level without providing some sort of remedy for the disagreements among the citizens themselves.  Thus we might consider a second form of dialogue which can be participated in more readily by all citizens.

Obviously this second form of dialogue ought not to make oppressive demands on the time and energy of all citizens on every matter.  All citizens will most likely have other interests and projects to engage in, different issues will matter in varying degrees to each of them.  And some may not have much aptitude or inclination for dialogue at all.  Still, I think it could be easily conceived as part of one's civic duty to pursue some such dialogue among one's immediate neighbors. 

Having discussed why I think we ought to have two separate kinds of dialogue which complement each other, neither of which we can afford to neglect, in the next two chapters I will describe these different forms of dialogue in more detail.  First, I will give a clearer picture of what I mean by urgent dialogue.


10. Theoretically, I suppose this compromise might extend beyond policy matters to the actual beliefs/opinions themselves, if certain conventionalist accounts of morality are correct. Still, given that the vast majority of people in this society to not have a conventionalist understanding of morality, it is hard to imagine how they could self-consciously and intentionally decide to compromise their moral views. [back]

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